“Burke shows again that he’s not just a comic genius, but also a fine dramatic writer and storyteller.” – Booklist. “Prose both scabrous and poetic.” – Publishers Weekly. “Proust meets Chandler over a pint of Guinness.” – Spectator. “A sheer pleasure.” – Tana French. “Among the most memorable books of the year, of any genre.” – Sunday Times. “A hardboiled delight.” – Guardian. “Imagine Donald Westlake and Richard Stark collaborating on a screwball noir.” – Kirkus Reviews. “A cross between Raymond Chandler and Flann O’Brien.” – John Banville. “The effortless cool of Elmore Leonard at his peak.” – Ray Banks. “A fine writer at the top of his game.” – Lee Child.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Thinking Inside The Bosch

Apologies for yesterday’s rant, people, and particularly for foisting my own purple prose on you in the name of ‘protest’. Normal-ish service is resumed today. Michael Connelly (right) was in town a couple of weeks ago, on a promo tour for THE DROP, his latest offering featuring Harry Bosch, and a very great pleasure it was to meet with him for the purpose of interview, which appeared on Saturday in the Irish Examiner, especially as Connelly qualifies as an Irish crime writer under FIFA’s grandparent ruling, and was good enough to pen a short foreword to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS. Nice. Anyway, on the with the interview, which opens up a lot like this:

BE CAREFUL where you stash your guns, people. You might just be corrupting an impressionable 16-year-old. Michael Connelly is the Irish-American author of 26 novels, the latest of which is The Drop, featuring his iconic Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Harry Bosch. From our vantage point in the plush environs of the Merrion Hotel, where the softly spoken Connelly sips tea in front of a blazing log fire, his ascent to literary superstardom, via numerous awards and critical acclaim, seems in retrospect inevitable. And yet, had the teenage Connelly not spotted a man acting suspiciously as he hid something in a bush, the world would never have heard of Connelly’s best-selling creations, which include Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch, Mickey Haller and Jack McEvoy. “I was from a middle- to upper-class background,” says Connelly, “more middle-class pretending to be upper, probably, so I had no real experience at all of the police. I loved reading crime novels and stuff like that, but this was like, ‘Wow!’. It was suddenly real life. And it wasn’t so much the crime part, finding the gun in the bush and all that. “What left a real resonance was the night I spent with the detectives, and comparing them to detectives I’d read about. A lot of my reading was stuff handed to me by my mother, so I was going from PD James to a real PD squad-room. And that opened my eyes a little bit. “In your life as a writer,” he reflects, “certain things have to happen, and sometimes it freaks you out a bit to go back and think, ‘What if that didn’t happen, or that.’ That moment had to happen for me to become a writer, because I was someone who’d been dropped into school in the middle of the year, and had no friends, and I became something of an introvert, which led me to read. So that was the first step. And then just happening to see this guy hide something in a bush had to happen. And then, later, I had to go see The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman at the dollar movie night at college. I didn’t have to go to that movie, that particular night. So all these elements of chance add up.”

Please don't apologize for "yesterday's rant." It's comments like that that keep me checking in on your blog. Just spent 3 weeks in Europe, which included visits to Occupy sites in Dublin, London and Amsterdam. In those cities and in Paris I saw plenty of evidence of what you describe as "those who can afford to insulate themselves." Meanwhile, back here in Portland, Oregon, the "brutalisation" continues:http://media.oregonlive.com/oregonian/photo/2011/11/occupy-portland-n17-496cd5b90fe2b00f.jpg

“Among the most memorable books of the year, of any genre, was Declan Burke’s ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL ... a fiendishly dark thriller that evokes the best of Flann O’Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.” - Sunday Times

“As good a collection of short essays on crime fiction as one is likely to find.” - Washington Post